Hockenbury Discovering Psychology 5th txtbk

Observational Learning221Bandura (1986) suggests that four cognitive processes interact to determinewhether imitation will occur. First, you must pay attention to the other person’sbehavior. Second, you must remember the other person’s behavior so that you canperform it at a later time. That is, you must form and store a mental representationof the behavior to be imitated. Third, you must be able to transform this mentalrepresentation into actions that you are capable of reproducing. These three factors—attention, memory, and motor skills—are necessary for learning to take placethrough observation.Fourth, there must be some motivation for you to imitate the behavior. This factoris crucial to the actual performance of the learned behavior. You are more likelyto imitate a behavior if there is some expectation that doing so will producere inforcement or reward. Thus, all the children were capable of imitating the adult’saggressive behavior. But the children who saw the aggressive adult being rewardedwere much more likely to imitate the aggressive behavior than were the childrenwho saw the adult punished. Table 5.6 summarizes other factors that increase thelikelihood of imitation.Observational Learning in AnimalsMany nonhuman animals have been shown to learn new behaviors throughobservation and imitation. One study involved German shepherd puppies whosemothers were specially trained to locate and retrieve hidden drugs (Slabbert& Rasa, 1997). Puppies who had observed their mothers locate and retrievethe packets of narcotics were significantly better at performing the same taskthree months later than were puppies who had not seen adult dogs perform thisbehavior.The ability to learn a novel behavior through observation has been demonstratedin animals as diverse as golden hamsters (Previde & Poli, 1996), starlings(Templeton, 1998), and Japanese quail (Zentall, 2003). Even guppies can learnforaging behavior and escape routes from other guppies (Reader & others, 2003).Along with learning new behaviors, animals learn to modify existing behaviors byobserving others of their species. For example, young rats that observed the eatingpreferences of older rats mimicked the food choices of the older rats (Galef &Whiskin, 1995).Chimpanzees, apes, and other primates are quite adept at learning through observation,sometimes in sophisticated ways (Brosnan & de Waal, 2004). For example,macaque monkeys are capable of learning a cognitive rule for ordering lists ofphotographs simply from watching another macaque successfully complete the task(Subiaul & others, 2004).Just as with humans, motivational factorsseem to play a role in observationallearning by primates. One study involvedimitative behavior of free-rangingorangutans in a preserve located in centralIndonesia (Russon & Galdikas, 1995).The orangutans imitated the behavior ofboth humans and other orangutans, butthey were more likely to imitate high-statusor dominant models than low-statusmodels. The orangutans were also morelikely to imitate models with whom theyhad close relationships, such as biologicalparents, siblings, or their human caregivers.Human strangers were virtuallynever imitated.Table 5.6Factors That Increase ImitationYou’re more likely to imitate:• People who are rewarded for theirbehavior• Warm, nurturing people• People who have control over you orhave the power to influence your life• People who are similar to you interms of age, sex, and interests• People you perceive as having highersocial status• When the task to be imitated is notextremely easy or difficult• If you lack confidence in your ownabilities in a particular situation• If the situation is unfamiliar orambiguous• If you’ve been rewarded for imitatingthe same behavior in the pastSource: Based on research summarized in Bandura(1977, 1986, 1997).Chimpanzee Culture: Observational Learningin the Wild Chimpanzee tribes in thewild develop their own unique “cultures”or behavioral differences in tool use,foraging skills, and even courtship rituals(Hopper & others, 2007). Apparently,these distinct behavior patternsare acquired and transmittedthrough observational learning(Whiten, 2009). For example, afteran individual chimp learned a newfood-gathering technique, the restof its group acquired the new skillwithin a few days. In turn, thenewly acquired skill spread to otherchimpanzee groups who couldobserve the new behavior (Whiten& others, 2007). These chimps in theEdinburgh Zoo are learning how touse a tool to extract food – one ofthe tasks that Andrew Whiten(2009) has used to study observationallearning and the developmentof unique behavioral traditionsamong chimpanzee tribes.